When you’re not part of the club and everyone around you is and is having a grand time, it is a royal pain in the neck. For me that was what Christmas was like in Minnesota. If I forgot what the holiday was all about, I might have been able to enjoy it. But I couldn’t really forget. It signified the birth of a religion that has caused untold grief and misery to my people and no series of pretty songs cover up that fact. We had Hanukkah to console us, a tiny blip on the calendar that got magnified all out of proportion because of its proximity to the Christmas behemoth just around the corner.
Here in Jerusalem, however, you really can’t tell that Christmas is coming unless you really strain and try. There are no “holiday” lights in the streets, no bombardment of ads pushing you to by gifts, no Christmas specials on TV, nor Christmas carols in the air. If it weren’t for BBC Prime and Star World on TV, you would hardly know the holiday existed. I honestly can’t complain. But for those non Jews among you who are receiving this, I have to say that living here in December would teach you on a gut level what being Jewish in the Midwestern United States is all about.
To drive the point home, the majority of Christians in Israel are of the “Orthodox” persuasion, that is to say they belong to one of the Christian Orthodox churches of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This means that they celebrate Christmas by the Julian calendar, about 17 or 18 days later than the Christians in Western Europe and the United States. December 25th is a workday here and has little importance because the “Western” Christians are not a real presence in the Middle East. Christmas doesn’t get serious around here until after January 1st.
Here, Hanukkah is the not the tiny blip on the calendar that is in the rest of the world. It is a holiday welcomed and yearned for, especially by children, because it means a week off from school. Many adults get the week off too, so vacations are planned around the holiday. Also, it is a nice break after seven weeks of no holidays at all.
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